October 14, 2008

DALLAS, Oct. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD -- LSI Corporation today announced significant extensions to its SAS portfolio with the introduction of the industry's first 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge cards and 16-port SAS storage processor. The new 6Gb/s SAS components for external storage applications extend the industry's broadest portfolio of SAS solutions. Major OEMs are sampling the new 6Gb/s SAS products to gain a time-to-market advantage for the deployment of next-generation SAS infrastructure solutions.

"The cost and capacity benefits of SATA drives are well known, but deployment in enterprise storage environments has been limited due to scaling and reliability concerns," said Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Group, LSI. "With today's announcement, LSI is supplying OEMs with a first-to-market solution for increasing storage system capacity at a lower cost, using OEM customers' robust, scalable SAS infrastructure."

The new LSISS9252 and LSISS9253 SAS-to-SATA bridge cards, which are for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, respectively, consist of fifth-generation LSI(TM) AAMUX(R) (Active-Active Multiplexer) technology, a dual-ported SAS host interface and SATA device interface. The LSI bridge technology is designed to enable single-ported SATA drives to connect seamlessly like native dual-ported SAS drives for use in enterprise storage systems using SAS expanders. The cards are completely designed, manufactured and warranted by LSI, providing OEMs with a reduced total cost of ownership and time-to-market advantage.

The cards support full SAS SSP protocol to the host, thereby removing SATA commands and signaling from the SAS domain. This helps to eliminate SATA affiliation issues associated with the multi-initiator configurations that are critical to enterprise deployments. In addition, two unique SAS addresses per host port help to eliminate any failover issues with the SATA drives. The cards support auto-speed negotiation (6, 3 and 1.5Gb/s SAS/SATA I/O) and Native Command Queuing, and are backward compatible with first-generation SATA I/O and 3Gb/s SAS. The cards support SATA disk drives independent of speed and capacity, and are universally compatible with third-party SAS controllers and expanders.

"Hitachi has been active in the development of 6Gb/s SAS, so we are pleased to collaborate with LSI to promote the new interface standard," said Brendan Collins, vice president, Product Line Management, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "SAS-to-SATA bridge cards will make it easier to design a single, configurable storage solution that meets a broad range of price, performance and scalability requirements. The configuration flexibility will result in storage systems that include a combination of SAS drives optimized for performance, and SATA drives that deliver high capacity and a low-cost- per-gigabyte for nearline storage and other lower duty cycle applications."

LSI is demonstrating a 6Gb/s SAS-to-SATA bridge solution this week at Storage Networking World in Dallas, Tex., booth #501.

16-port SAS storage processor for external storage

The new LSISAS2116 is the industry's first single-chip, 16-port SAS storage processor for external storage systems. It integrates a PowerPC(R) application processor, x8 PCI Express(R) 2.0 with root complex, support for 8GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory, and 16 ports of 6Gb/s SAS to provide users with enterprise-class performance and features.

With its unique combination of features, the LSISAS2116 provides the benefits of reduced component count and flexibility in the design of host-side interface connections, enabling SAS-to-SAS, Fibre Channel-to-SAS, and iSCSI- to-SAS external storage solutions. The LSISAS2116 solution also supports both initiator and target modes, further extending the connectivity implementation options. These features greatly improve performance while reducing power consumption and system cost in comparison to discrete components.

Since the inception of SAS, LSI has delivered market-leading SAS solutions across a broad portfolio of controller ICs, expanders, host bus and MegaRAID(R) adapters, RAID-on-motherboard solutions and storage systems.

More information on the new 6Gb/s SAS solutions is available in an online press kit at http://www.lsi.com/presskit. More information on the complete LSI SAS portfolio is available at http://www.lsi.com/sas.

About LSI

LSI Corporation is a leading provider of innovative silicon, systems and software technologies that enable products, which seamlessly bring people, information and digital content together. The company offers a broad portfolio of capabilities and services including custom and standard product ICs, adapters, systems and software that are trusted by the world's best known brands to power leading solutions in the Storage and Networking markets. More information is available at http://www.lsi.com/.

Editor's Notes: 1. All LSI news releases (financial, acquisitions, manufacturing, products, technology, etc.) are issued exclusively by PR Newswire and are immediately thereafter posted on the company's external web site, http://www.lsi.com/. 2. LSI, the LSI logo, AAMUX and MegaRAID are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation or its subsidiaries. 3. PCI Express is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG. PowerPC is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation. All other brands or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.